Mother Nature's Restless Sons

By CHARLES McGRATH

Published: September 16, 2007

CORRECTION APPENDED

IN the spring of 1992, after vagabonding around the country for two years, Christopher McCandless, a 24-year-old Virginian and Emory graduate, hitchhiked to Alaska and set off into the wilderness with little more than a .22-caliber rifle and a 10-pound sack of rice. Not far from the Teklanika River, he set up camp in an abandoned International Harvester bus, a 1940s relic of the Fairbanks City Transit System. He lived there for four months, from late April to late August, before finally starving to death. When his body was discovered in September, he weighed only 67 pounds.

Exactly what happened is something of a mystery. Some Alaskans believe that Mr. McCandless was a hopeless tenderfoot with no business being alone in the wild. Others speculate that Mr. McCandless, who had burned or given away all his money, cut himself off from his family and renamed himself Alexander Supertramp, was mentally unbalanced.

Jon Krakauer, in his best-selling book about Mr. McCandless, ''Into the Wild,'' argues that he had sufficient skills to survive but might have inadvertently poisoned himself by eating the seeds of the wild potato plant. Mr. Krakauer's book also suggests that, far from being deranged, Mr. McCandless was a hero in the tradition of Jack London and Thoreau: a solitary quester, an explorer of his own interior landscape, in search of a more authentic relation to the natural world.

The Krakauer view has prevailed among a small band of pilgrims who over the years have visited the bus and made it an informal shrine, keeping everything there much as Mr. McCandless left it and adding their own written tributes. The place, 22 miles from the nearest road, is apt to become a full-fledged tourist attraction after the opening next week of ''Into the Wild,'' a deeply affecting movie version of the Krakauer book, with cinematography so beautiful it makes the Alaskan landscape seem seductively otherworldy.

The movie was written and directed, and even partly filmed, by Sean Penn, who invested the project with some of the same testy singleness of purpose he has recently brought to his political activism, his reporting stints in Iran and Iraq, his jeep tour of Venezuela with Hugo Ch?z. That Hollywood might not be wild for a movie about a guy who slowly turns himself into a cadaver did not deter Mr. Penn for an instant.

''The place is like nature on steroids,'' he said in July, recalling the first time he visited the bus and its surroundings. This was at a dinner given by Paramount, the movie's distributor. Earlier, Mr. Penn, wearing a dark suit and tie, his hair brushed back in a bristle, had introduced a screening of ''Into the Wild,'' and watching other people watch it made him so nervous that he kept ducking out for a smoke.

He was still tinkering with the film, he said, after cutting it from almost five hours to two and a half. People who had seen a version just a month earlier said this one was already subtly but significantly different.

It took Mr. Penn years to get the film made, and in many respects the process became a mirror of Mr. McCandless's own stubborn quest. Mr. Krakauer's book has an autobiographical section in which he says that he was drawn to Mr. McCandless's story because as a young man he too was a solitary, rebellious risk-taker.

Mr. Penn has left out the Krakauer reflections, but in talking about the movie he every now and then manifests an almost ornery intensity. You sense that he also saw -- or wanted to see -- a kind of alter ego in Mr. McCandless, someone who refused to conform to the system and embraced the world on his own terms.

Mr. Penn read ''Into the Wild'' not long after it came out in 1996, he said recently over the phone, and when he reached the last page, he turned back and started all over again. Right away he knew he wanted to film it. ''If you want to know what it was about the book that hit me, I don't mean to sound catty, but that's what the movie is all about,'' he said a little impatiently.

He was not the only filmmaker interested, and like the others he approached both Mr. Krakauer and Christopher McCandless's parents, Walt and Billie, who were understandably ambivalent about the idea of a movie based on their son. In the book the McCandlesses come across as an unhappy, frequently quarrelsome couple, of whom their son angrily disapproved. One of the things that caused Christopher to break with his parents, it turns out, was his discovery that his father had not only been married before, but also had had another child with his first wife after Christopher was born.

Mr. Penn was eventually chosen among the suitors. He said he thought he ''had an advantage over the others because I never mentioned money.'' Then, just as he was preparing to fly to Virginia to complete the deal, Billie McCandless got cold feet. ''It all came down to a dream she'd had,'' Mr. Penn explained. ''All of a sudden she didn't want to be part of it.''

It was 10 years before she changed her mind, and during that time Mr. Penn had to abandon his original casting plan. He had imagined Leonardo DiCaprio as Mr. McCandless and Marlon Brando as Ronald Franz, a retired Army man and widower whom Mr. McCandless befriended shortly before leaving for Alaska. In the movie Hal Holbrook portrays Mr. Franz, and Mr. McCandless is played by Emile Hirsch, who had to lose 40 pounds -- almost a quarter of his body weight -- to appear sufficiently skeletal at the end.

Correction: September 23, 2007, Sunday
An article last Sunday about the film ''Into the Wild'' misidentified the location of Carthage, the city where the protagonist harvested grain. It is in South Dakota, not North Dakota. Also, the article referred incorrectly to the film's release. It opened on Friday; it does not open this week.